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“You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

wired.com

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Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#51

Post by ikeboy »

p4bl0 wrote: post #44
ikeboy wrote: post #29

>Publishers acquire this research free of charge Except of course they don't. They provide publishing services, which cost them between 60-80% of the revenue each paper bring in (based on profit margins between 20-40%). Authors sign over their copyright in exchange for this consideration. (If they didn't get anything, the copyright assignment wouldn't be valid.) > leading journals have stepped forward to make new fin…

Have you ever published a paper in an academic venue? What publishers offered was delivering paper versions of articles to your local research library. Now they only host PDFs online. Apart from that their added-value work is negligible. The biggest improvement I've seen by a publisher of one of my papers was changing "Sec." to "Sect." when I was referencing section, and putting page number in blue rather than black…

>Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to.

Those all seem to be sponsored. That won't scale to every paper unless some large organization funds it. The biggest open access journals all charge.

> it includes literally zero work from the publisher.

As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, I find this hard to believe. If you think they're wasteful, you can run your own and try to spend less, but denying their costs won't convince me.

>The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige

Like I said, this model doesn't fit with the numbers we have about their margins. I'd at least expect over 50% profit margin if they were merely extracting rent, and probably closer to 90%.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#52

Post by acidflask »

ikeboy wrote: post #33
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How many people read this research? 1% of America? If anything, it's 1% of the world. The problem is not limited to the US. And it's a very significant 1% which is one of the biggest - if not literally the biggest - drivers of the world economy. >The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it. Parks have huge continuing expenses. They're also owned in trust for the p…

>Journal publishing has almost no expenses at all. If their expenses of 60-80% of revenue is "almost nothing", surely their revenue is also "almost nothing", and therefore we shouldn't care about it.

To cite just one example, Elsevier consistently reports over $1b/yr profit on $3b/yr revenue. Not exactly "almost nothing".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier

https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-acc...

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#53

Post by ikeboy »

p4bl0 wrote: post #50
ikeboy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If nobody paid, publishers wouldn't have revenue from access, and so would need to charge authors directly, which would make science costs go up.

That is not true, because it is possible to get rid of the publishers entirely. The only thing that would be needed are people in charge of formatting and such, because some fields do not use LaTeX yet (this need concerns mostly biology, chemistry, and medicine). But that could be easily covered by small local businesses for a teeny tiny fraction of the costs of current subscriptions. The other thing that costs money…

The large open access journals that don't have independent funding charge rates within the same order of magnitude. What evidence do you have that an order of magnitude reduction is actually possible at scale? How do you explain the expenses of both traditional publishers and open access ones, and how would you eliminate them?

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#54

Post by aeorgnoieang »

ikeboy wrote: post #32
jbmorgado wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it. This analogy is completely wrong. The money you pay in admission to the parks go towards the parks in order to maintain and improve the parks, even though you already do that with your taxes. The money you pay to scientific publications goes to the publisher alone, it does not , in any case, end up financing science.

If nobody paid, publishers wouldn't have revenue from access, and so would need to charge authors directly, which would make science costs go up.

But we don't even need the publishers at all! There are already free venues for publishing documents!

It's also not even obvious that (anonymous pre-publication) peer review is better than just publishing everything and letting anyone and everyone comment on it just like anything else shared publicly on the web. I mean, for just one example, it's a big deal that researchers don't already publish everything!

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#55

Post by ikeboy »

acidflask wrote: post #52
ikeboy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Journal publishing has almost no expenses at all. If their expenses of 60-80% of revenue is "almost nothing", surely their revenue is also "almost nothing", and therefore we shouldn't care about it.

To cite just one example, Elsevier consistently reports over $1b/yr profit on $3b/yr revenue. Not exactly "almost nothing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-acc...

If $2b of costs is almost no expenses, then surely $1b of profit is as well. You can't have it both ways, downplaying their costs and complaining about their profit.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#56

Post by vic-traill »

joering2 wrote: post #26

... meanwhile Wired told me "The thing about AdBlock..." and prevent me from reading this "free" article. Funny thing - I don't even have AdBlock.

I expect there are a number of observable events or non-events that can be used to infer the use of an ad blocker. They don't necessarily work well ...

I've been presented with a "We see you're using an ad blocker ... please turn it off" message (I can't recall where, perhaps Bloomberg or the WSJ?) when I've just had a Hosts file in play.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#57

Post by ikeboy »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #54
ikeboy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If nobody paid, publishers wouldn't have revenue from access, and so would need to charge authors directly, which would make science costs go up.

But we don't even need the publishers at all! There are already free venues for publishing documents! It's also not even obvious that (anonymous pre-publication) peer review is better than just publishing everything and letting anyone and everyone comment on it just like anything else shared publicly on the web. I mean, for just one example, it's a big deal that researchers don't already publish everything!

If we don't need them, why are they still being used?

You may think peer review is over-rated. The response should be to convince others of that and get them to stop using it, not complain about the high cost of peer review/journals/etc.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#58

Post by p4bl0 »

thaw13579 wrote: post #15

I think the most important point was brushed over in the article--that journals offer prestige. Scientists are entirely aware of the problems, yet they still volunteer to submit their work to them, because they significantly improve the chances of promotion and tenure. These things are already tremendously competitive, so most would rather not volunteer for a handicap by publishing in other venues.

Exactly. The open access problem is very tied to the « publish or perish » one. Interestingly, the biggest publishers are the ones who lobby in favor of bibliometrics, and even sell off-the-shelf bibliometrics solutions (e.g., SciVal by Elsevier).

One of the major problem is that bibliometrics criteria are necessarily impacted by inertia of prestige, and publishers own the title of the most prestigious journals.

Older, tenured scientists could just go and stop publishing in those journals to build up the prestige of new (really) open access ones, but the fact is that most often they co-authors papers with their students or at least younger, un-tenured scientists, and they understandably don't want to sacrifice the careers of the new generation.

Some funding agencies now requires that work they fund are made open access, but sadly, publishers lobby in the US and in Bruxelles weight a lot in favor of "authors pay" model, and many funding agencies includes publishing budget in research grant for this reason. That is very frustrating because people mix up real open access with open access paid by authors, while 1- other economical models are possible (see my other comments on this page), and 2- countries and funding agencies could legally enforce that every papers published in a non-open access journal must be made available immediately in an open repository such as arXiv, overruling the decision of publishers who often put an embargo of e.g. 2 years before this can be done.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#59

Post by aeorgnoieang »

ikeboy wrote: post #30
biehl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if all of those things were non-rivalrous, and had neglible marginal cost.

So no tolls on non full roads?

There are expenses involved in using a road even when it's not full.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#60

Post by Zigurd »

jcizzle wrote: post #18

By this notion, I should get free tickets to all college football games. And my driver's license registration should also be free, don't my taxes already go to paying for the DMV? Wait, should anything that is even remotely funded by taxpayer dollars now be free for everyone that pays taxes?

Why not? First tier college football is incompatible with the mission of public universities, and fees are mostly regressive taxation. You are assuming the status quo is good and right.
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